Still in Love

by Michael Downing

Richard pressed the harmonica to his lips, and then pocketed it. He yelled, “Sold!” and waved the twenties for his wife to see. His eyes were teary. “So awfully quiet around here.”

  The Professor headed for his car, hoping his young seedlings weren’t dead.

  * * *

  Technical Exercise 3.

  When Mark looked up, all twelve windowsills were occupied. Sighs and hums occasionally rippled through the silence, and soon gave way to so much better, can’t even tell where he cut until I look at the other pages, 60 percent shorter but at least now it has an ending, I didn’t know you could start with the guy already looking at stuff in the yard, so much better it’s almost like somebody else wrote it.

  “Are we going to bother to have workshops on Wednesday?” This was Dorothy.

  Leo said, “Good question. Why listen to people talk about all the stuff I shouldn’t have bothered to write in the first place?”

  The Professor said, “Everyone will read the first drafts. Only the writer will have read the essential-text version I prepared—which is not my idea of the authoritative text but my sense of what works best, what matters most in your original. Other readers, I trust, will confirm or contradict or otherwise complicate my reading. So, please take a packet of all twelve stories on your way out.”

  Mark said, “Jane? Maybe Anton? And—someone else was hoping to see me in office hours.”

  “I was.” Isaac was still flipping back and forth from his original to his essential text. “But this sort of answers my question about how to start revising.”

  “I’ll be in my office on Wednesday.”

  Jane and Anton nodded.

  Max said, “I always end up leaving this class feeling insulted and grateful. Is that Stockholm syndrome?”

  “The death toll in Paris is up to nineteen,” Dorothy said.

  Rashid waved. “If I came by Wednesday on the later side—two o’clock, or so—would that be okay?”

  “I’d be sorry if you didn’t,” Mark said. “Knock to let me know you’ve arrived.”

  The Professor said, “Enough. Take a packet and go away.”

  As the classroom emptied out, Mark flipped back through the briefer and admittedly more promising draft of his yard sale story the Professor had prepared. He didn’t countenance every edit—he missed the identifiable lesbians and thought their discovery of the sleeping bag was more potent when a reader had a fix on their identities. But the essential text made it clear that the central characters needed more clearly inscribed arcs than he’d provided in his draft, and it was inarguably true that he could now choose 250 new words to etch those into the story. What surprised Mark more, more even than the Professor’s advance delivery of the annotated drafts of all thirteen stories this week, was the second, thicker packet beneath his essential-text packet.

  Mark read the cover page a couple of times. He had to admit it was clever.

  You are the attending physician. The NEPCAJE books are the patients. The many nurses have done the hard work of carefully reading, considering, and reviewing each patient’s presenting problems and progress.

  Save your precious time for what really matters.

  What followed were twenty-five pages of a perfectly noncontroversial literature review. Mark was impressed. The Professor had simply copied the titles on the NEPCAJE reading list, opened up a page of space beneath each one and, with the addition of a few introductory sentences and connecting clauses, inserted reviews from professional journals, major newspapers, and even a few incomprehensible foreign-language publications, which aptly and authoritatively and irreproachably summed up the central argument made by each author and the counterarguments that had bubbled up in the wake of its publication.

  Attached to the NEPCAJE literature review were four additional pages, a windy and rather pompous first draft of an op-ed that the Professor was hoping to send to the New York Times by the beginning of next week, as well as a parenthetical threat about imminent delivery of the first sixty-five pages of a novel that was well underway.

  FOUR

  1.

  Jane, Anton, and Virginia were seated on the floor outside his office when Mark arrived a few minutes before one o’clock on Wednesday. Max was a few office doors down from them, perched like a bird on an upturned recycling bin, hugging his legs, chin resting on his knees, eyes closed, ears plugged into something, his blond plumage gathered on top of his head with a rubber band and splayed out like a little cockscomb.

  Two doors opened across the hall. Alan Truemay, whose Chaucer seminar started halfway across campus just about now, backed out of his office, surveyed the hallway, and clucked his disapproval at the students camping out in his backyard. He was built like a broomstick, and he had long cultivated an image in the department as a misanthrope, which was his attempt to take credit for being disliked. He kept one hand on the wall as he inched down the hall and said something to his shoes about building codes and fire laws, as if students were a safety hazard.

  No one emerged from the other open door. Rita Jebdi also had a one o’clock class, but Mark knew from former students that her Romantic Poets course was widely known as The Late Romantics.

  Anton said, “Jane’s first.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind waiting,” Jane said, but she slapped down the cover of some tome—one of the Russians, Mark guessed—brushed back her red hood, and stood up quickly, pulling a piece of paper from her satchel as she sped past the others. “Maybe we should start with this.” She handed Mark a revision of her yard sale story. She sat down.

  Mark read the first few lines.

  “And if it’s okay with you, I’d also like to discuss my idea—not my idea, because I know you don’t approve of us having ideas, but my strategy? Maybe I mean my approach? I’d like to get your permission before I waste too much time.”

  Mark looked up. “Permission for what?”

  “Oh, keep reading for now, and then we’ll talk.”

  Mark said, “Any other instructions?”

  “No, no, not unless you would like me to explain why I shifted the yard sale to Buck’s County. I have been there. More than once. It’s a famous part of Pennsylvania.”

  Mark said, “Anything else?”

  “You did make a big deal about specific place names in class.”

  Either she was tone-deaf or obnoxious. It was often hard to tell with students. Mark said, “You sound aggrieved.”

  “I do?” Her freckles disappeared beneath a flashflood of a blush. She was either ashamed about her performance so far or embarrassed that she didn’t know the definition of aggrieved. Another tricky distinction.

  “Are you nervous, Jane?”

  “So.” She shrank a few inches and shook her head. “My stories seem so stupid compared to everything else in the class. I’m getting a lot of criticism in workshops. I mean, I know I missed a few things we already went over in class, like place names. But why does that make me seem greedy? Is that what you just called me?”

  “No.” Mark turned away and put her revision on his desk, waiting until he was sure his smile had faded. He spelled aggrieved for her, and as she took notes, he explained that she’d sounded annoyed, as if she felt his urging her to be specific in her fiction was unfair.

  “I’ve never even heard that word before.” Again, she sounded aggrieved. She studied the notes she’d taken. “Are you sure that’s how it’s spelled?”

  So, maybe she was tone-deaf and obnoxious. “Pretty sure,” Mark said. He had intended to reassure her about the quality of her short stories, but now he was leaning toward a lecture on her attitude. Instead, he grabbed her revision. “I want to read this aloud to you.” It was tempting to provide etiquette lectures, psychological counseling, and even romantic advice during office hours, as it was tempting to devote class time to propagandizing for any number of political, cultural, and social causes—and not only because it required no preparation, no genuine engagement, no effort at all. After a few minutes in an office or a few hours
in a classroom, it was easier to pretend you knew a young woman well enough to diagnose her attitude and correct her behavior than it was to accept that what was actually between you, all you really shared, was a story you had requested and she had delivered. Mark said, “I’ll stop and make a few notes for you to think about later, and you should also take notes on anything that doesn’t seem to work as you intended.”

  He started in immediately, and so did Jane, who proved to be the much harsher critic.

  Her diagnosis: nothing happens during the first half of the story, and the second half is so rushed it’s impossible to follow.

  Mark’s diagnosis: Maybe a bit too much of the hello, and my name is, and oh, hello, there, my name is, and how are you, and other procedural dialogue that readers didn’t need. And there were also at least three wordy exchanges about how much is that followed by that costs this much in dollars followed by will you accept this much in dollars for that, all of which could be better accomplished with a few price tags and a simply stated counteroffer, like Thirty? “By my quick count,” Mark added, “you could cut about fifty words that way.”

  “Oh, easily,” Jane said, a little smugly.

  Mark said, “Now, you’ve got three minutes to ask your other question.”

  “It’s about using one of the Technical Exercises—expanding it into my first full-length story.” Jane had pulled out a folder and rearranged its contents as she spoke. “I mean, is that going to be original enough for you?”

  Mark said, “Is it original enough for you?”

  “I guess that depends,” she said.

  “I agree,” Mark said.

  That seemed to satisfy her. She stuck her folder into her satchel and stood up. “Who should I tell to come in next?”

  Mark said, “Let them figure that out,” and ushered Jane into the hall as Virginia walked in.

  “I won’t take up too much time, I promise.” To prove her point, she dropped her suede pouch onto the seat of the alumni chair and dug out two pieces of paper. “I revised two of my stories. I hope they’re better. I think they are. I kind of lose track of my original train of thought, what I thought I was writing about, I mean, because sometimes I’m so interested in some particular thing we talked about in class, like suggestive language, or even those—contractions?”

  Mark sat down at his desk. “Conjunctions.”

  “Why would I call them contractions?” With her braids and headband, she looked like the poster girl for a Happening, circa 1969.

  Mark said, “Did you want to give those revisions to me?”

  She did, but she was hoping Mark would read them later—“any time you feel like it, and if not, that’s fine, too”—so she could come back next Wednesday to go over them before class. As she handed over her revised stories, she said, “Do you grade us on effort?”

  Mark thought, As opposed to? But he didn’t say so, not least of all because the Professor considered effort irrelevant and accused Mark of behaving like Santa Claus at the end of every semester. Fortunately, Mark didn’t have to say anything.

  Virginia was also wondering—this required another dive into her suede bag, though she came up empty-handed—if Mark would read an application essay she was writing for a dance fellowship, which she promised to find and email to him before their meeting, or else she was going to end up in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.

  Mark said, “Is that not a good thing?”

  “It’s good because it’s pretty near Annapolis, where my girlfriend is.”

  Mark said, “At the Naval Academy?”

  Virginia nodded.

  Mark said, “Wow.”

  Virginia said, “Right?” She dove in to her bag one more time. No luck. Her girlfriend had another year at Annapolis, and the MFA program was three years long, and who knew where the girlfriend would be while she worked off the five additional years she owed the navy? “And that’s only if you don’t suspect she is secretly hoping to stick it out for twenty years or more,” which Virginia clearly did, though if someone offered her the chance to be in a dance company for twenty years, she’d probably take it, so fair was fair. And could they also maybe talk about how she was doing grade-wise next week?

  Anton was next, and he was all business, having discovered a raft of new conjunctions for his monosyllabic story, some of which were conjunctions. He was surprised to learn that then was not a conjunction but an adverb, and he was aggrieved when Mark told him that next could be an adjective, adverb, a noun, or a preposition, but not a conjunction.

  “Basically, everything but the one thing I want it to be?”

  Mark said, “Just about.”

  Anton said, “I started writing a story about a person.” He let it go at that for a long while. He wasn’t dragging around the car coat today, but he did have a new sweater—a black wool turtleneck, which looked warm, but made him look jaundiced and deathly thin.

  Mark said, “I like stories about people.”

  “He’s sick,” Anton said. He leaned down and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans, exposing the flannel lining. To reassure Mark? To provoke a sartorial comment?

  “People do get sick,” Mark said. “Who’s telling the story?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it first-person? Or is there a narrator?”

  Anton had to think about that. “You know, you’re right. I should have made a better choice about that. Right now, the guy is telling the story. But what about having a narrator who’s omniscient, you mean?”

  “Depends on what you want us to know, what you want us to discover as we read. By way of—”

  “I know, I know, by way of example, not as a suggestion. I must’ve read that in your typed-out comments on my stories ten times by now.” Anton turned over the annotated draft of his revision, and pointed a pen at the blank page. “So, what’s your example?”

  “By way of example, and not as a suggestion for you to adopt,” Mark said, “the narrator might be another character in the story, someone who doesn’t know everything, someone who might not know or understand anything about the person who is ill.”

  Anton said, “So it could be first-person, but that other person would be the storyteller?”

  “Right. Or you might want to use third person-limited.”

  “Of course! Like that yard sale story. We’re limited to the buyer—in my story, the guy who is not sick—but we’re actually more interested in the guy who is sick.”

  “Or neither. Maybe what occasions the intersection of their lives is the real story. Maybe the illness is not the heart of the story.”

  “What’s the transaction? What’s the currency?” Anton was writing furiously.

  Mark said, “Are you sure the other guy is not sick?”

  Anton giggled. “I didn’t actually know there was another guy till I sat down. Would it be okay if I left now and just went to work on this before class?”

  Mark said, “Goodbye.”

  Anton said, “Goodbye.”

  Before Mark sat down, Rashid knocked on his open door. She was wearing an ivy-vined off-white headscarf and something belted at the waist that looked like silk pajamas.

  “Come in.”

  Rashid backed up a few steps into the hall. “Wouldn’t you like a few minutes to yourself?”

  “I spend way too much time with myself,” Mark said. “Take a seat.”

  Rashid sat at attention in the alumni chair. Good manners, or just good posture?

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mark.”

  Mark said, “I really prefer to have visitors during office hours.” It was not impossible to imagine that Rashid had been a young man—Persian, Mark guessed—and was now transitioning toward her true self as a young Muslim woman. Or perhaps the headscarves were just part of a strategy to deflect curiosity from gender to religion or ethnicity. Or maybe she was a young Iranian Muslim woman. Or a young American woman with an olive complexion and a soft spot for silk? All suggestive, nothing definitive.


  Rashid said she was struggling with her revisions, and she had decided not to bring any of them with her today. She looked even more beset when Mark reminded her that she didn’t have to revise all three of the Technical Exercises, that is was up to her whether she chose to revise one, two, or all three to include in her final portfolio.

  “One way or another, we’re always forced to choose for this class,” Rashid said. “It’s not at all what I expected when I signed up for creative writing.”

  Mark said, “Is it frustrating?”

  “Very,” Rashid said, and smiled for the first time. “I’m sure that makes you happy.”

  Mark said, “Does it make you happy?”

  “Not really,” Rashid said. “But I get the sense you’re not trying to make us happy—like with your notes on our stories. I mean I am very happy they’re typed—so grateful to get something from a professor that I can actually read for a change. But they are so detailed, and they make me so aware of what my story isn’t, the opportunities I didn’t even notice. And then it’s all back on me. I mean, I hope you know I love our class, except when I realize I have to start a new story or try to revise one of the old ones. And then it’s choose, choose, choose all over again. It’s like trying to decide what to cook for dinner while you’re standing in the middle of Whole Foods.”

  Of course, that was exactly what people who weren’t served their meals in cafeterias and restaurants did before they cooked dinner. Instead of pursuing the home economics lesson, though, Mark said, “Thus, the utility of limits. I mean, if you have only $20, and you can only shop from three aisles in Whole Foods, and you have to feed twelve people—well, suddenly, the choices are not so many, and the meal has already begun to take shape. You won’t be springing for lobster, for starters.”

  “It’s hard to do that—not only to impose limits, but to love them, like you want us to.”

  “It’s hard to remember that one story is not every story, that every meal is just one of many meals you will prepare. And the more carefully you choose and arrange the specific ingredients for the one meal, the more memorable it will be.”